http://bit.ly/udg-free

Description: we will explore the benefits of using and sharing openly licensed resources, and assess how they might improve our teaching.

Opener: One way of defining open educational resources (OERs) rests on David Wiley’s framework of the “Five R’s” (started as four, another was recently added).  These activities enabled by “open” resources are:

Retain – the right to make, own, and control copies of the content

Reuse – the right to use the content in a wide range of ways (e.g., in a class, in a study group, on a website, in a video)

Revise – the right to adapt, adjust, modify, or alter the content itself (e.g., translate the content into another language)

Remix – the right to combine the original or revised content with other open content to create something new (e.g., incorporate the content into a mashup)

Redistribute – the right to share copies of the original content, your revisions, or your remixes with others (e.g., give a copy of the content to a friend)

Let’s break into small groups (2-4 people each), and talk about these rights. Do they matter to us? Do we need to bother, or can we just take what we need from the internet without thinking about them?

After five minutes of group discussion, we will come back together to share our descriptions and experiences, and assess the value of OER to us.

At the first Free Studio, I posed this question: here are some of the responses I received.

flickr photo shared by giulia.forsythe under a Creative Commons ( BY-NC-SA ) license

Challenges:

1. (Easy) Use one of the suggested OER collections or search tools, and identify some open online resources that you might use in your teaching.
2. (Medium) Identify one or more OER from the suggested OER collections or elsewhere, and build a simple learning activity around them.
3. (Advanced) Combine (or “remix”) multiple OERs from multiple sources, of multiple media types (text, image, audio, video) and create a “new” OER from them.

Suggested tools and resources:

flickr photo shared by reanetbr under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license

https://www.oercommons.org/ – OER Commons collects resources from many sources, an excellent starting point.

http://www.open.edu/openlearn/ OpenLearn from the UK Open University.

http://open.bccampus.ca/ – Open Textbooks, a site managed by BCcampus in Canada.

Wikilibros – ‘un proyecto de Wikimedia para crear de forma colaborativa libros de texto, tutoriales, manuales de aprendizaje y otros tipos similares de libros que no son de ficción.’

INTEF – “Banco de imagenes y sonidos”

Radialista – “Más de 3.000 audios para escuchar o transmitir libremente”

https://creativecommons.org/, http://www.creativecommons.mx/  – One way to openly license work.

http://search.creativecommons.org/ – A collection of search tools to find openly licensed resources.

Closure:

Let’s take a look at some of the results from our challenges. Some questions:

Do the OERs already available open up new possibilities for using online media in your teaching?

Do you feel excited or fearful (or both) at the thought of sharing your own work for others to reuse?

What barriers emerged to you as you worked through your challenges? What questions do you have now?

flickr photo shared by reanetbr under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license